Time Warner Faces Suit After Taking Over Los Angeles Sports Market

Time Warner Cable’s spending spree for the rights to carry the Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Dodgers has altered the Southern California sports market. The Lakers have already left one of Fox Sports’ regional sports networks. The Dodgers will leave a different one after the season. The result: new regional channels featuring the teams that will add to the bills of local cable, satellite and telephone subscribers.

Those rising costs prompted four consumers to file a class-action lawsuit Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court against the teams and Time Warner Cable. They claim that the billions that Time Warner Cable is paying for Lakers rights is already causing subscribers to pay an extra $4 a month. And when SportsNet LA, the new Dodgers channel, is launched, they will pay another $4 to $5 a month.

Citing studies that show that 60 percent of the overall population are not sports fans, the lawsuit said that “left to their own, they would not subscribe to pay for Lakers telecasts.” And, it added, “a very large segment of the consumer public is not sufficiently interested in Dodgers games to pay $50 to $60 a year.”

Yet the four consumers said nonsports fans could not unsubscribe from those networks because they are sold as a bundle on the expanded basic levels of their cable, satellite or telephone service. They said that the practice of bundling “is an unfair method of competition,” and they want the networks to be sold on a stand-alone, or a la carte, basis so that only those who want them have to pay for them.

The four consumers — two of them cable subscribers, one a DirecTV subscriber and one a Verizon subscriber — filed their complaint in Los Angeles Superior Court. They are seeking to become the representatives of a much broader class of subscribers and to establish what they describe as the illegal behavior of the teams and Time Warner Cable.